The Coolest Street 911 In History Hits The (Auction) Block

The opening minutes of Le Mans contain perhaps the most subtly powerful automotive endorsement in film history. It’s the day before the race is slated to begin, and Steve McQueen’s character, Michael Delaney, is driving his 1970 Porsche 911 around the course, stopping to look at the spot where he’d crashed the year before. There’s nothing exciting about his trip along the small French streets, no speeds above perhaps thirty or forty miles per hour, none of the ridiculous, staged tail-out antics which are now found in everything from video games to Nissan Altima advertisements. There’s merely the plain implication: The Porsche 911 is the car chosen by the world’s finest sports-car drivers. If you don’t want that 911S desperately by the time the sequence is done, you don’t love cars very much — and if you wanted it very desperately, now’s your chance.

Fox News reports that the 911 used during the filming of that sequence will be auctioned by RM this August. McQueen fans will be pleased and saddened to learn that the Porsche wasn’t just a prop:

McQueen brought it with him back to California after filming wrapped, but was forced to sell it just a year later when his company, Solar Productions, went bankrupt, largely due to the making of “Le Mans.” The production of the film was riddled by troubles and a relative flop at the box office.

It’s hard to know how much money the car would fetch. A 1970 911S is a hell of a car even without any celebrity provenance, and this would certainly be the most valuable of its type. We’ll take a random guess and say it’s worth $90,000. That kind of money will barely get you a Cayenne S with a few options, so it’s easy to guess which way a true Porsche fan would go. True Steve McQueen fans, on the other hand, may just want to figure out a way to bypass the firewalls at work and check out Jalopnik’s revealing feature on the man himself and the equipment he couldn’t sell.